During the pre-historic times of ice age before the discovery of fire, before the evolution of homo-sapiens, the Indian peninsula has just struck the Asian continent a few thousand years ago and the Himalayan mountains are still starting to emerge from the ocean depths. Owing to their lesser heights they are rich in flora and fauna. The crevices which are incompletely formed caves of the great mountains are housed by the then intelligent species of the planet. Still having not discovered the benefits of social living each of the creatures live independently alone in the dark caves. These creatures equipped with their superior intelligence and strength are particularly hostile not only to the other species but also to the members of the same species. Unlike the creatures now they were particularly strong and sturdy and easily lived for over a thousand years. They began to notice the changing temperature levels as the mountains grew taller and as it got more and more cooler they are delving more and more deeper into the caves, into the darkness and ignorance!
In one of those unenlightened caves lived a member of the species who is relatively strong and intelligent. He wakes up when there is light in his cave reflected off the slopes of the nearby hills and when feels the warmth of the light. His eyebrows are evolving to be thinner and there is much lesser hair now compared to a hundred years back to detect the slightest presence of light. Moving away the fur of the animals he was enrolled in to protect himself from the himalayan nights he walks out of the cave. Probably he is the only one who is a biped. He discovered he could walk on two legs some three hundred years back. Members of other species who still move on four legs are immediately scared and intimated in his presence. All of them are ape-looking and the most feared predators in the surrounding region. Walking out of the distorted crooked cave is an arduous task, it would take a professional trekker a day to come out of those ridges and grooves. Driven by his instinct to take food he hunts for anything that is edible. The last three hundred years as he was a biped, he has been inclined to survive on snow pumas and sabretooths which are really ferocius, difficult to hunt and are tasty henceforth. Deers and bisons are easy kills he thought. As he grew older, his strength and agility grew but unlike earlier he was preferring the easy kills now. Even though his instincts urged him to hunt in the higher altitudes where more wilder animals lived, he was not listening to them... for no reason apparently.
As he became less and less hostile he was having more and more idle times, and ample amounts to think. He used to spend days beside the ponds in the mountains staring at it. When he was younger he used to go there to quench his thirst although he never understood what thirst was. Owing to the less developed brains the species had very less memory, they cannot remember the details of incidents which have happened a week ago. So practically they have a weeks' memories which makes them a week old. Their age is just one week. But he could remember much more, more than what all other members of the species could remember together. He didnt have to learn anything from the beginning, so unlike other members who moved away from the forming caves to the lower altitudes he stayed. He knew that he was seeing lesser members of the species in the outside every decade. He never hunted them for he saw they resembled himself, nevertheless they ran away at his sight. He assumed the caves were empty but never ventured into them. In some caves he thought he saw there was some light coming from within. He did try to delve into the cave, but as he was advancing more into the cave it was getting more and more cooler. This confused him as he associated warmth with light. So he never ventured into the other caves.
As he was spending more and more time in his own cave, in the darkness, his mind started to evolve and think. He would stare into the darkness and his neurons would show him all the memories of his long life. He understood the most abstract quantities. He measured the duration by saving the water dripping from the walls of the cave into a leaf carefully placed amidst rocks. When he drank the water, the quantity was a measure of the duration he thought. Although he never learned to count. He observed the periodicity in the snow storms and hence he would take precautions not to go out. But immediately after a snow storm he would go out to hunt and bring all he could. So he managed to stay in the cave during the storms and live longer than other members. Once there was a storm and he stayed incaves(:P) as usual... but little did he know this storm was going to change the fate of his life and the life of his further generations, thereby the face of the entire planet.
.. .. .. To be contd!
